On General Chute's march, West Coast

On General Chute’s march, West Coast shows the mixed imperial, colonial and kūpapa, or pro-government, Māori force led by Major-General Trevor Chute around Mount Taranaki in 1866 during the West Coast campaigns of the New Zealand Wars. The tedium of the trail of soldiers is relieved by the striking, centrally placed Māori woman astride a white horse. General Chute and the politician Dr Isaac Featherston, who had secured the support of kūpapa for the campaign, look on, and leading the Forest Rangers is the artist himself. The Prussian-born Gustavus von Tempsky had been lured to New Zealand by the promise of gold in 1862. He later became a leader of the Forest Rangers and was killed in action in 1868. Between periods of military service, von Tempsky pursued an artistic career. Many of his paintings drew their subject from the New Zealand Wars, but rather than documenting events accurately von Tempsky wrote that he hoped his paintings would be ‘sufficiently true to nature to be recognisable and sufficiently idealized to suit artistic purposes’.1

On General Chute’s march is more than idealised: it provides no clue that the campaign was an embarrassment — Chute’s troops became lost and resorted to eating their pack horses to survive. In 1867 von Tempsky approached the Colonial Museum director, James Hector, asking him to ‘push’ the paintings he was sending to Wellington for exhibition. He hoped Hector would be able to see ‘at least a sufficient number of good points in them to permit your voice of friendship, for me, to overrule the niceties of your artistic acumen’. He also wondered whether Hector could ‘get one or two subjects painted for your museum’.2 Sales from the Wellington exhibition were disappointing and no commissions followed, leading von Tempsky to state that he would ‘no longer paint for the public, I’ll paint for those who rule the public’.3 On General Chute’s march was a result of this new strategy, and was painted for politician William Fox, who gave it to the Colonial Museum in 1872, making this work the first painting to enter the collections. It was subsequently shown at the first major art exhibition in Wellington, the Industrial Exhibition of 1878, as well as the New Zealand International Exhibition in Christchurch, 1906–07.

Rebecca Rice

1. Cited in Anthony Murray-Oliver, ‘Sufficiently true to nature … sufficiently idealized …’, in Gustavus Ferdinand von Tempsky: The man and the artist, exhibition catalogue, Waikato Museum of Art and History, Hamilton, 1978, p. 8.
2 Gustavus von Tempsky, letter to James Hector, 29 June 1867, MU147/1/404, Museum of
New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa archives.
3 Cited in Leonard Bell, Colonial constructs: European images of Maori 1840–1914, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1992, p. 125.